Re: [abc-dev] New Publication: Implementing concern-specific languages with ABC

Hi Eric,

Thanks for your email!

On Thu, 3 Feb 2005, Eric Bodden wrote:

> compilation process. Also I tried to reflect on the effort I had to
> overcome while using ABC and give some advice on possible
> improvements.

One of the (entirely justified!) criticisms you make is of the lack of
comments, and that's something we do work on when we have time. If you'd
like to identify specific places where more comments would be helpful,
we'll try to give those areas special attention. You could even supply
some yourself based on your own understanding of the code :-)

> However, it would be great if you had any comments about this work.

You use a separate bytecode analysis tool to read in Java 5 annotations
from compiled bytecode. Could this stage have been avoided if abc
supported Java 5, so that the annotations would presumably have been
available from the source?

You also mention that improving lexer extensibility to allow extra states
to be added would be useful. Can you give examples of how it would help
you?

I also realised from reading your comments about modifying the ant build
file that this part isn't very extensible! Of course it's a fairly trivial
task, but perhaps it should be. I'm inclined to suggest that extensions
should be compiled into separate jar files to abc itself, but of course it
would then be a bit more of a nuisance to use them.

> Also if you would like to link the works from your ABC website, feel
> free to do so.

We'll add a new section for this kind of thing as soon as we get a chance
:-) Do you plan to make your extension available?

Cheers,

Ganesh
Received on Thu Feb 3 23:00:29 2005